There’s several levels of rewards you can go for. At the $10 level you get your pick of Dungeon World or Fate Inverse World PDFs, while at $15 level you get both at once. The $30 level is the first physical tier, though it also includes the PDFs. For $50 and $70 you get some physical goodies like post-cards, design commentary, thank-you notes and custom content for your own game. $100 gives you everything plus some artwork. A special $125 bundle intended for a group of four people comes with multiple copies of the game and some of the goodies, and baked-in international shipping, which is a good idea considering how much international shipping can be a bummer for both kickstarter backers and for the creators.

Inverse World is already funded, so you don’t have to worry about whether or not you’ll get it – now it’s all about what you’ll get out of it. The Kickstarter has currently accrued $9000 worth of donations. A number of stretch goals have been reached, such as an additional post-card and new Adventure Locations for the game. The next Stretch Goal at the $10,000 level adds an Instant Islands guide for DMs to quickly create new, interesting places; a $13,000 stretch goal adds vehicles and mounts to the game. Both sound like great values that could vastly improve the play experience.

If you’re a fan of Dungeon World or FATE and want a unique and tasteful new take on fantasy, you’ll want to back this. Already even the smallest tier is looking like a great deal, so give it a look.

Outdoourcing is now up for sale in various venues!

Smashwords.

Kindle.

Nook.

The Ebook edition contains new scenes, expanded scenes, better editing and flow, and twice as many words as the original, all used to deliver more hyper-evolved jungle demon action, investment drama and good-natured hunting humor. Every purchase helps my ongoing endeavors, such as Literalchemy and this blog, which I hope to continue.

Next up, I plan to work on a completely original ebook-exclusive story called Gorgewings: A Consumerist Horror Story. It will feature the return of our favorite computer peripheral, the Kill-Slate 3G with KOS, aiding a brand new protagonist against a brand new foe in a brand new setting. Watch out for that too once it drops. I also hope to have a bunch of Ladybird stuff made into an ebook at some point, once I have few more stories (like Library completed, the one I’m planning after that, and the Ackley mini stories, as well as a few ebook exclusives). Look forward to that, as well!

Thanks for all your support so far!

There will be spoilers, but I’ve not finished the game (12 hours or so going right now) and I’ll try not to spoil the bighuge twists of it. It’s possible that the final stretch of the game’s content will be different, but I don’t think it can redeem how unremarkable it feels when the game could have been pretty groundbreaking. This post won’t be a review, but rather a collection of my thoughts on the things that I felt the game promised, and could’ve done a lot with, but didn’t deliver.

Andbleugh Ryaugh

I’m going to focus mostly on the game mechanics in this post. But I did want to touch upon this subject due to what Bioshock was like. Compared to Bioshock, the ideology and its presentation in Binfinite falls pretty short. It’s basically just graphic and shocking set dressing, and its politics are very poorly thought out and lopsided.

I really hate how the Vox Populi were presented in the game and I feel that it is a huge disservice to the real history that the game used as a grounding for its core ideologies. They are such awful burn-down-the-house anarchist caricatures and such a hamfisted conservative’s nightmare. It feels like the hidden enemy the Tea Party would think wants vengeance on all the world’s privileged people. Whereas Comstock and the like are based on a history of racism and oppression in the USA, the Vox Populi are just a cartoon that makes Comstock also seem cartoonish in mutual association  Binfinite has a sad and honestly pathetic message behind the conflict in the game: that they’re all the same, the oppressor and the oppressed, they’re all as bad whenever they decide to hurt others despite context. It’s incredibly facile and childish.

Competent But Soulless Shooting

I’m actually a fan of shooting games. I’ve probably played every major shooting game that’s come out in a long time and I enjoy games like Call of Duty (and the original Bioshock). Binfinite is a competent shooter with a decent variety of guns, but that’s really all I can say about it. Enemies are very samey, and the setpieces aren’t distinguished.

The problem I have with it is that Binfinite isn’t scripted enough and it isn’t open enough. It doesn’t have the kind of action Bioshock had where it was a semi-open environment that allowed you pick and choose different tactics and had enemies of markedly differing toughness that you could pick your battles against; and on the other hand it doesn’t have the variety and spectacle that heavily scripted games like Call of Duty have, where every mission is a fairground of different weird things to do like the mortar shooting, the sniping, the AC-130 section, the helicopters, the straight-up firefights, the stealth sections, and so on that you do over the Modern Warfare series. It really fails to innovate in this space.

The downright best parts of Binfinite are the skylines. The most fun to be had with the game is to use the skyline melee as much as you can. You can spec your character with gear and vigors that make melee really good, and whenever a skyline is there you can go to town. It’s very spectacular and you’ll hate it whenever there’s not a hook around to use. And that’s a LOT of the time, sadly. Even the skyline has its bad moments though. There’ll be more than one time where a skyline won’t be vertical enough to attack enemies a tier above you, forcing you to the ground and to move up through staircases or buildings to reach their perches and fight them conventionally. It is very frustrating and it happens more often than you’d think it should.

Every other encounter is simply too stylistically weak and repetitive. There are very few enemy types and the game teeters between being too easy and being too difficult. The same enemies are overused throughout the game, to the point that the Vox Populi inexplicably gain the resources to have their own handymen and motor patriots later in the game so they can be entirely the same as Comstock’s forces in equipment and challenge, which was very absurd to me, but I guess necessary for the game. I’m not sure how much “1999 mode” can alleviate these problems, because when the game decides to be challenging, its difficulty spikes absurdly and its deaths are hilariously punishing and never seem to follow a concrete rule as to what you lose or what’s supposed to happen. Especially since you’re dependent on its checkpoints to respawn, many of which aren’t well handled. Either they’re too close or they’re too few and far apart!

In addition, the Bird doesn’t deliver. I don’t want to say a lot more because it’s a huge spoiler, but there are really no Big Daddy-esque elements to any enemies in this game. None of them wander, none of them chase, none of them have that element of ominous challenge. The Bird does not bring the tension anyone said that it would.

Elizabeth Is A Walking Item Dispenser

Hey do you remember all that cool stuff that Elizabeth was supposed to do, like team up with your vigor powers to do cool new stuff, and use her incredible magical radiant AI to interact organically with everything and everyone and dazzle you with how alive she seems? None of this seems to have carried over. Elizabeth is a walking item dispenser that makes you hit F a lot in combat. All of her powers are entirely pre-determined by the setpiece fights and involve you hitting F so she’ll spawn objects or health, limited to making cover, spawning robot guns, and making pickup barrels.

Elizabeth’s dimensional abilities are also entirely scripted, and never involve Booker’s vigors. In fights, enemies outright ignore her unless they’re scripted not to, at which point she’ll either be captured (so far this is the prevalent result) or kick them in the balls (she does this a single time). It is vanishingly rare that Elizabeth actually interacts with something or does something that isn’t about giving Booker stuff. Not even the “cutesy” moments made it in!

Outside of fights, Elizabeth’s AI interactivity is confined to leaning against objects and bending down near objects, as well as making frowny faces when Booker is listening to a voxophone. Outside from one scripted sequence so far, Elizabeth has done very little with the game’s environments that did not involve her rummaging for money, ammo and salts (magic) for Booker to use. She does, at a few points, get mad with Booker and turn her back to him whenever you stare at her, which is interesting, but nothing revolutionary. In fact I might be imagining that whole thing. Maybe it’s all just part of the AI that keeps her out of your firing line at all times. It’s frustrating compared to what was hyped up.

Elizabeth is the farthest thing I could think about from being an organic or living AI. She’s very clearly heavily scripted and working in routine, and the environment is bizarrely apathetic to her overall presence. I might be exaggerating, but I feel like Binfinite promised so much more than what they delivered with her.

Vigors Are Dull And Unexplained

Plasmids were fairly deeply involved in Bioshock’s story and many enemies made use of them, and you saw the consequences of having those powers and their origin. No such thing happens in Binfinite. Vigors are magical drinks that are readily available from vending machines but aside from scripted crow and fireball enemies nobody uses them except you, and they’re basically just there because Bioshock settings have cool magic powers.

But the Vigors aren’t terribly cool either.

Most of the Vigors are a poor fit for the strengths of Binfinite’s combat. Their range is poor, the effects are mostly uninteresting, the trap effects are fairly pointless, they’re unbalanced and they’re fairly finicky to land. In fact, you start your Vigors off with the game’s essentially strongest magic – Possession, handed to you for free, allows you to get free money, free allies, free guns. Salts are fairly easy to come by and Elizabeth will throw you more when you need them, and the advantage of possessing the correct enemies is so astounding you’ll hardly need anything else. Me personally, though, once I got it, stuck to the Charge vigor. It lets you essentially do a teleport punch with your grappling hook toward any enemy you please. Specced for melee, your character becomes quite ridiculous, and actually fairly entertaining mostly. Enemies are samey, and too easy, and all of your fights are the exact same routine, but your routine is to tornado punch everyone.

Unfortunately you get Charge like 4/5 through the game. New Vigors are very few and far between in the game, so you’ll be rooted even more closely to Possession. The character’s progression and the pacing of new upgrades and equipment feels very slow and poor.

One More Thing

This is not meant to be a comprehensive review but rather the things that disappointed me based on the trailer and interview hype, and how interesting Bioshock itself was in its time. I was looking forward to this from the trailers, though I knew I would be disgusted with the hand-wavey and somewhat cowardly cartoon centrism in the narrative. I played it, and I’m not finished, and I’m going back to see the ending.

But so far I haven’t enjoyed it as much as I wanted to. 12 hours in, I don’t think it’ll change.

Binfinite is a well-built and pretty-looking AAA game. I’ve found no glitches and I’ve never been entirely frustrated with the controls, the visuals or the shooting on a technical level. I don’t think this needs to be said, or dwelled on, because it’s a AAA game with a huge budget and technically competent studio. It was always going to be pretty and cutting-edge and a nice show of its hardware. But the game still lacks some soul, and does not live up to either its legacy or to its promises for me. It straddles many ideas of what Bioshock was, but lives up to none.

In many ways Xenoblade defied a lot of conventional gaming wisdom, so much so that it wouldn’t have been localized at all in North America had it not been for some quite admirable fan efforts. Xenoblade is a new IP, which meant it was unproven and recognized mostly through the fame of its director; it’s a JRPG, a genre which few companies seem to have faith in nowadays; it is a Wii game, so it was technologically behind similar offerings on other platforms.

I would argue though that in every way that counts for a game it was definitely ahead of similar offerings on other platforms, especially a contemporaneous big name upon which enough ire has already been unleashed. For the Wii, this is a beautiful game, but more importantly, it is big, vibrant and colorful where competitors grew dull; it is accessible and fast-paced; it has a story that is not merely serviceable but actually pretty good, with a lot of heart and imagination.

It is basically one of the best games for the Wii. I’d put it at #1, but it’s at least Top 5.

Setting and Story

The Setting of Xenoblade is immediately pretty interesting. The game takes place on the bodies of two giants, the Bionis and the Mechonis. These two colossal beings, large enough to hold two whole worlds on their surfaces, fought in time immemorial and now lie dormant, whether dead or sleeping it is unclear. Biological life flourished on the Bionis, including civilizations: the Hom or Humans, like we all know them; a curious little race of round furry creatures called Nopon, and the High Entia, an almost mythical, long disconnected race with (supposedly) great power. On the Mechonis though, a faceless group of alien, mechanical beings arose, called the Mechon. The Mechon and their many models and units serve as the game’s big antagonists. Seemingly the goal of the Mechon is to wipe out life on the Bionis – and it is especially the Homs, who have many colonies all throughout the Bionis, who see the most frequent and deadly violence from the Mechon’s invasions.

At the start of the game things seem mostly lost. Homs have some heavy guns and tanks mixed with the quintessential swords that are the soul of JRPG warriors – but their weapons have a poor time against the advanced technology of the Mechon, of whom even the smallest and weakest still tower hungrily over a human, which they eat when they can grab some. However, the Homs have an ace in the hole: an ancient, mysterious sword called the Monado (the titular xenoblade) that mysteriously damages Mechon, as well as helps others inflict damage to Mechon (as well as a two-debuff mechon-killing trick you’ll be employing a lot when the sword alone can’t cut the mustard). Wielded by the hero of Colony 9, Dunban, the sword holds off the Mechon in a big battle that also serves as the player’s tutorial and introduction to the game’s mechanics.

The Homs then return home, seemingly victorious, to Colony 9, where the first playable characters of the game reside. Shulk is a young man scientifically curious about Mechons and the Monado; Reyn a big guy with a big mouth, but good-intentioned, brave and understanding; and Fiora, an energetic girl who sometimes acts as a voice of reason, and sometimes advances into trouble herself. Soon the Mechon return, as they always do, and this small cast will expand, learn more about the monado, the mechon, the world, other people and themselves, both gaining and losing along the way.

That’s the setup of course, and it goes on from there with many interesting twists. It would involve huge spoilers (that I implore people new to the game not to seek out) to explain some of the many wonderful moments the game has. It has heart – there are touching moments, heroic moments, mysterious happenings, with enough gravity and seriousness to sell them. The voice acting sometimes phones it in, but for the most part the story is solid and solidly told.

Characters

You start off with a seemingly cliche assortment of characters – Shulk, the requisite cute teenage JRPG male protagonist who is nice, inquisitive, and a bit reserved; Reyn, a strong energetic best friend character who easily talks himself into trouble; and maybe like 15 minutes into the game you get Fiora, the requisite cute young woman who is sensitive, vivacious and just a bit more controlled than the other two. They do push these characters in different directions, though not incredibly so. They’re not really unique, but their development is relatable and endearing. Few of the twists on these characters come out of left field – when they act dramatically it’s pretty much always in line with what you know about them.

The character designs in Xenoblade are pretty down-to-earth compared to other JRPGs. A lot of JRPGs get really crazy-looking characters, but all of Xenoblade’s characters are pretty “normal-looking,” if disproportionately very attractive. It’s a video game, and a JRPG at that, so having cute-looking marketable characters was basically a given, but there’s no ridiculous hair, and very few skimpy or crazy-looking outfits (except for a few armor sets, such as what’s basically a fanservice swimsuit on any character that you equip it on). Everyone looks pretty modest and familiar, and I like that.

The group is tight-knit and friendly and I love their interactions with each other and with other people. They’re helpful, sensitive and hopeful. Where a lot of characters nowadays are jaded anti-heroes, the group in Xenoblade want to understand what is happening around them, and they want to do what is right by most people. Though their quest essentially becomes one for revenge against the Mechon for their constant attacks, this quest is noticeably more hopeful than a lot of other revenge-driven stories. It never consumes the characters or renders them inhuman. Though it sounds naive it’s refreshing to me to see heroic characters who are not apathetic or brutal – you pretty much only see that from Japan nowadays.

It might also be just the graphics tricking me, but I see a bit of refreshing diversity to the characters you meet and play as during Xenoblade. Reyn and Dunban seem to have fairly distinct, slightly darker skin tone from Shulk and Fiora for example. Later human characters also have fairly different tones, bodies and facial features. Xenoblade’s got a lot of different-looking humans and that’s pretty nice to see. The Entia are also different among themselves and fairly different from the humans.

Everyone gets a chance to shine both in battle and in the story and cutscenes, and you never feel like a character’s arc is really “over” before the rest – everyone gets a lot to do, say, and develop throughout the game even when it looks like their personal conflicts apart from the Mechon war might be mostly resolved. The female characters are treated pretty well, which is usually a concern of mine. None of them are ever “the white mage” where all they can do or do best is heal or support – the game mechanics encourage everyone to take an offensive role. This role continues in the story and cutscenes. Everyone gets heroic moments and though everyone sort of pales in comparison to the protagonist, Shulk at least saves everybody’s bacon all the time, so there’s no real “damsel in distress” moments. He saves Reyn and Dunban a lot too.

Gameplay

Xenoblade uses a real time battle system where you can move one character that you control (you can switch to and use any character in your party, but only outside of combat by changing a battle order) around the environment. The character delivers auto-attacks with his or her weapon every so often by themselves. The environment doesn’t usually play into things much, but you fight right on whatever ground you were standing, and sometimes both you and your enemies can take advantage of terrain, such as knocking enemies back into hazardous pools, or escaping battles over rough terrain.

Your commands mostly involve moving the character, selecting enemies to focus on, and choosing cooldown abilities. You can have 8 equipped cooldown powers, along with your character’s special ability that takes up the 9th, center space on the ability bar. You select powers by using the d-pad on the Wii remote, and press A to execute them. Cooldown powers occur as soon as possible after you hit the A button (barring some long animations for some powers), so you can interrupt your auto-attacks to deliver them, or follow up your auto-attacks with a cooldown to take advantage of the timing.

You can give a few rudimentary commands to allies, and later you gain a limited ability to give direct commands. During battle, you’ll be prompted to encourage and compliment your allies to improve the relationships between them. This helps them get fired up, increasing their “tension,” which allows them to hit harder and resist enemy attacks better. Characters who have been demoralized because you didn’t pay them attention during the fight will miss more and do less damage. Aside from this, successful attacks and high-damaging or debuff-inducing powers help build up a party gauge that you spend on a few different mechanics, such as reviving allies who fall, or employing powerful, time-stopping Chain Attacks.

Enemies are always visible and wandering the world. They have a variety of detection methods and behaviors that you’re taught to pay attention to if you want to avoid unnecessary battles. For example, most enemies engage if they see you, but some have bad eyesight and only engage if you make too much noise (run past them), and some ignore you completely until you use magic near them, which attracts them to you. Some enemies are docile and won’t engage you at all unless you attack them first. When you engage an enemy first, there is a reflex-based prompt where you have to press B at the correct moment when a shrinking circle has reached the inside of another blue circle, and doing so gives you some benefits.

Playing with the nunchuk and wiimote felt pretty good to me. You can move the camera with the C button on the nunchuk and the d-pad on the wiimote, and you move with the stick on the nunchuk, so you can move your camera and your character at once. You can jump, though not very high and though you’ll hardly ever use it. You interact with the A button and handle reflex prompts in battle with the B button. You will basically never do QTEs like we know them – there’s one reflex “hit B at the right time” prompt you’ll see everywhere that reflex is asked, and only within battles.

The controls are easy to learn and everything important in the game has a quick tutorial. When mechanics change they do a new tutorial to teach you what to do from now on and why you’re doing that. The game is a lot deeper than this as you’ll soon read, but you can play it pretty well just by doing the cool things you feel like doing and no more. Every character has unique abilities and a role in the party, though I feel like the aggro-drawing characters (aggro and some other familiar MMO mechanics play a role) are disproportionately worth including in tough battles. So for most challenging fights, the successful combination will almost always be Shulk, plus an aggro-drawer (like Reyn), and then anyone else rounding it out. Sometimes I would like to go into a boss battle with a random assortment of characters but it rarely works to my favor.

System Nuances

Characters gain power – it’s an RPG. Experience points work like they usually do, leveling up your characters to give them more XP and basic stats in locked, invisible progressions – the mage will earn more Ether (magic) than Strength and so on. Every character is very customizable beyond this, however. Characters have Skill Trees that they develop with Skill Points they earn. Characters who like each other a lot can equip some of each other’s skills for further customizability. They also earn ability points that they spend to level up their cooldown powers and improve various aspects of the power. Every character will learn quite a bit more than the 8 ability slots you get inside a battle, so you can play with a lot of different builds.

Fighting isn’t the only way to earn XP, Skills and Ability points. Exploring the environment and finding new areas and locations earns you points. Finding Fast Travel locations gives even more points than finding normal locations, but every environment you’re in will have many locations to find. Put all together, exploring gives enough XP to make up a couple battles, and more AP and SP than most ordinary battles. There are also Achievements you can strive for, and earning cheevs also gives you XP, AP and SP. I would love to see what a low level run of the game does with these systems.

You earn money and find treasure in order to get new equipment. Equipment has slots where you can fit gems. You can craft gems from crystals or gem cylinders you find. There’s a ton of properties that gems can have, and there are 5 levels of gems with rising percentages of power – I’ve got a bunch of gems like 30% more auto-attack speed, 40% chance to go undetected by aerial enemies, +50 to an attribute, and so on. The crafting system allows you to make gems by pairing two characters together who work the gems using a machine. Each character has a special ability and three special stats for the craft system, which itself has three different “flames” or modes that affect the craft differently, so it, too, can be pretty involved. It’s not entirely necessary to play it, but it helps enormously, especially when trying to expand a character’s role. For example you can stick a bunch of aggro and HP gems on characters who otherwise can’t draw aggro or tank and use them as limited tanks.

Speaking of the environment, it’s quite large and very good looking for the Wii. It is colorful and there are a lot of creatures and objects. It feels like MMORPG level huge. Draw distance sometimes pops things in as though from out of the fog on the distant horizon, but hey, it’s a Wii. They’ve done a hell of a lot within the limitations as it is. Character faces on their models sometimes look a little odd, but you get used to the textures and design of their bodies and they look good enough. All cutscenes that I’ve seen look like they are in-engine – there are no prerendered cinematic cutscenes. This is good because those cutscenes would probably look a lot better than the engine itself and as it is the game looks pretty consistent.

Still, it’s a Wii game! It looks good for the Wii, but it’s not a graphics powerhouse.

Verdict

I already gave you the verdict when we started! This is one of the best games on the Wii for me, and I would encourage you that if you have a Wii and didn’t get it, try to hunt it down. It’s, sadly, probably way into the unreachable collectible item price range by now, but if you see a retail-priced copy at a store, you should get it and you should play it. It’s fun, it’s well-thought out and put together and it is very rich, pushing the Wii to its limits with big environments, lots of customizability, endearing characters and an interesting setting and story that may not be super original, but is very well told.

Right now, the game is nearing the home stretch. All of the game parts are basically done. What’s left is to finish up the advanced character content (additional stuff like Perks and Talents for characters to expand), and finish up my thorough Adventure Building section (calling it “the GM’s section” is wrong because I want player to read this too), and then write some introductory content for you to use – plots, critters, NPCs and so on. I second-guess myself a lot on gamey-parts, I really want this to come swinging out of the gate with cool lore, and interesting and easy-to-grasp gameplay. I’m trying to set aside that and not let perfect be the enemy of done, but I’m a huge tweaker, and it’s hard not to find things to tweak.

But it’s near done.

There is one section now that is entirely drafted and that’s the Lore section for the World of Uttarakuru. Here is the dropbox link for you to take a look at that. Hopefully you’ll get some enjoyment from it.

This time around we’ve got Channel A, a premise near and dear to the hearts of a lot of anime fans. I’m pretty sure anyone who has watched enough different anime, and seen the almost absurd breadth of topics they take on, such as the animal-eared people in ancient japanese clan warfare found in Utawarerumono; alternate history mecha rebellions in Code Geass; magical transforming girls in Madoka Magica; and seemingly nothing at all in K-On!; and much more, will have thought about their own conceptual mash-ups and how that mash-up would work as an anime.

In Channel A you do this all the time, because the basic premise is that it is a card-based tabletop game where you get the elements of your anime from cards, and have to put them together into a pitch for the producers. Like Cards Against Humanity it’s a simple concept and derives humor from the combinations and interpretations people put together. Unlike Cards Against Humanity you won’t feel depressed after playing it. The funding goal is $10,000 and they’re at $1500 now. You can even download the game right now in a basic format so you can take a look at it before deciding whether to pledge.

The basic reward tier is the $25 dollar tier that gets you the game and a series of fun little buttons. Even more fun is the Mystery Box, which includes the game, and three exclusive mystery buttons (mystery may vary) for $25 as well. At $65 dollars you’ll get two copies of the game, the buttons, and a series of five custom buttons with your own chibi (small, cutesy, super-deformed characters) character on them. At $250 dollars you’ll get a special DVD for your own custom-made anime, along with two copies of the game, and the usual set of buttons. The DVD will include a 30 second theme song for your anime, and other goodies.

Stretch goals include a funny video with a cat in it (you know you want this), more exclusive cards at $14,000, more buttons at $16,000, and an exciting expansion set of new cards at $18,000, designed by Ewen Cluney in a livestream with the game’s backers. Ewen Cluney is known for the translation of Maid: RPG and the upcoming Golden Sky Stories, and is the creative force behind Channel A. You can check out his blog here. He’s a pretty cool guy.

So if you’re a fan of humorous light-hearted party card games and anime you should definitely give this a look. You could possibly have a K-On! level success on your hands, albeit only in your own imagination.

The Legalization of Meteor Grass: Seven years ago a small chunk of space debris struck the backyard of an ASAN researcher in an incredible stroke of good luck (for science) and bad luck (for the expensive pagoda she had built in said backyard). The space debris contained several odd plant lifeforms which the scientist quickly drove over to ASAN HQ. Named Meteor Grass, this alien plant life form was cloned and studied extensively, and found to have incredible medicinal properties. However, it had one crippling flaw that caused the Regressive administration of the time to outlaw further research – it made people too happy when they used it. A raging debate has gone on to this day as to whether Meteor Grass should be allowed, carefully controlled, to supplement other drug treatments for various illnesses, in spite of its nefarious happiness-causing properties. The Hippie party strongly supports the legalization of Meteor Grass, while Regressives fear its toxic influence on their taciturn constituents.

I wanted to think out loud a little about removing armor as we know it from tabletop RPGs, and how best to do it. Armor is definitely a strong element in the aesthetic of many characters in our games. The Space Marines of Warhammer are known for their incredible Power Armor, near-impregnable to standard weaponry. In fantasy we have armored Knights, and the staple of the heavily armored character who has focused on shrugging off lethal blows is usually paired with a heavier frame and stronger, more visible armor. We also have lighter armor, which gives minimal protection to sly, quick Roguish characters, who would feel encumbered and inhibited wearing heavier, more protective armor than their own.

But armor has sometimes felt like a third wheel when it comes to gauging, in terms of the rules, the balance of Offense and Defense in games. Many Games have a health system and unique character classes that are expected to use certain types of equipment. Do we lose anything by expecting that the Space Marine will always wear heavy powerful armor, and simply modeling that by giving the Space Marine more robust health to counter the damage inflicted upon them? Wouldn’t it be simpler if we baked in the light armor of the sly quick characters in some other intrinsic part of their overall stat package?

Does Armor merit inclusion as an independent part of the system? I know some people who’ve talked about “Shopping List Fatigue” – how games that include deep armories tend to lose them because of all the combinations obfuscating what their character can ultimately do. It can be complicated balancing out Armor and Weaponry such that characters can feel protected and tough where wanted, but can still be harmed and challenged. It’s a tough balancing act between health and injury, and when you add extra layers that determine overall survivability, the mathematics behind it get murkier.

Armor could be written into health so it’s obvious survivability. The Space Marine, instead of having Unnatural Toughness times [a lot] and Armor [tons] and a hell of a lot of Wounds, could just have a hell of a lot of Wounds that directly represent how tough the character is. The role of Damage Reduction could exist but be lessened, and become a better trade-off. It’s pretty much assumed in many games your character will wear armor and if they don’t they’re pretty well dead. And sometimes even when characters don’t wear armor they’re given a choice to make that just up and gives them armor anyway. For example, in D&D 4e the Monk goes without armor, but gets bonuses that make it exactly as if he or she is wearing Armor. This preserves the game balance, but it really goes to show the thin veneer of relevance that Armor has, in my opinion. It’s a shopping list item everyone is expected to have, so why not just bake it in? Focus on balancing offense vs health; leave armor out of it.

13th Age seems to do this by having weapons and armor inside the character classes as well. It strikes me as a simpler system in which the offense and defense clashes are easier to suss out. On the face of it, we do lose something by having the Rogue character unable to get into bulky armor, or assuming the Space Marine always wears heavy armor. But we can get that back if we just give them character options unrelated to coin or quartermasters that they can take to switch up the numbers a bit and model those changes while retaining their identity – a Space Marine in any Armor could still be tough, just in certain degrees of tough; and a Rogue in any Armor could still be quick, just certain shades of quick (and tough).

Armor in tabletop games can sometimes have a constricting effect on gameplay because of how it’s modeled against dice. You’ll note that in most video games there is never a chance that Armor will prevent all the damage you’re taking, and much of what Armor does in the game mechanics is making HP last longer. Commander Shephard in Mass Effect can only go invulnerable through stacking on protective, active abilities, and never completely. Shephard’s Armor can be customized toward higher defense, but that essentially just gives more HP. In Skyrim the only way to completely block attacks is by parrying them actively with a shield or weapon, or using magic. Armor itself won’t blunt all the damage you’re receiving. In a lot of RPGs, however, it is harder to balance Armor because it can mean the enemy does nothing to you at all – in D&D it can be outright impossible for characters to fight heavily armored enemies stronger than them, even with large groups of characters, because it takes luck to land hits on them at all. In the Warhammer 40k RPGs, an enemy’s armor might be so huge that without specific armor-piercing weapons, it can be impossible to deal any damage to them. A lot of larger, powerful enemies fit this bill.

Of course, we can say the same for weapons. We can abstract weapons into the characters that use them – 13th Age does that too for example. I’m a personal fan of varied weapons. I feel that weaponry in games is a space that can be more active and interesting than Armor is. A lot of games already do this with weapon keywords, special powers and abilities keyed off specific weapon use, and archetypes like the Rogue that uses light weapons. I would say that the Rogue’s use of light weapons is a lot more interesting and active a design space than the assumption that the Rogue must wear light armor. I think weapons can be much more defining of what a character plays like than the Armor that is worn. Somewhere out there though, someone is probably making the opposite argument. And I think in that case it can still be valid. In fact I’d like to see a system where your Armor defines you and your weapons are baked in. I feel like doing the opposite myself, right now though.